Merchant Park Community Garden

I’m hoping this website will be pretty easy for all of us to start using, but I also thought a more detailed introduction might help get us started more quickly.

I’m going to go over the features I’ve added to this site and add some instructions for customizing your profile information. If something isn’t clear or seems wrong, please let me know!

If you have more ideas for ways we can use this website, feel free to leave comments on this post or send them to webmaster@merchantparkcommunitygarden.org.

Individual Logins

If you ever sent Ann your email to say you were interested in this  project, you should have received a message with login information by now.

If you haven’t, please use the form on the About page to sign up for one now!

As I sent in the e-mail, your login will allow you setup a personal profile, join groups and add to the group project discussions, and add comments to updates here on the blog section.

Don’t want to login to the site? You can still sign up for updates on the blog through our RSS feed or the e-mail subscription link here:

Subscribe to Merchant Park Community Garden by Email

Profiles

You see a summary of “activity” for your profile by clicking on the link in your name when you’re logged in or by searching in the Members page.

To add information to your profile after you log in, click on your name and look for the Profile link in the menu on your activity page. Then click on the “Edit Profile” link. I’ve set up the profiles so we can share a little information about ourselves but still keep some information private if you’d prefer not to have it listed publicly online.  If you want to add a picture to your profile, look for the “Change Avatar” link next to the “Edit Profile” link.

If you have questions about what shows online or suggestions for something else we should add, feel free to send me a note. You can also look at my profile to see what it looks like when it’s filled out: http://www.merchantparkcommunitygarden.org/members/emily/profile/

Groups

I’ve set up groups to match the committees that Ann asked people to sign up for at our first meeting. Not all of them are projects we’re working on right now, but I hope these groups will provide an easy way for us to share information and post updates on our work progress. I’ve added a few updates to each group to get us started, but I’d love to see the rest of you take over.

If you’d like to sign up for a group, go to the Groups tab to see the full list or look at the sidebar on the site. When you sign up, you can choose whether you’d like to get e-mails with updates to the group or not and you can choose how often the e-mails are sent to you.

If you’d like to see what’s been going on in a group (or at least what I’ve been able to put up so far), here are the forums for each group:

• Plot Construction
• Operations
• Water
• Fundraising
• Marketing & Communications
• Fencing and Maintenance
• Water
• Composting

In our second meeting, we talked about having a committee head for each group who could work on organizing the tasks, etc. If you’d like to volunteer for a position like that, let me know and I’ll “promote” you to group admin so you can send out updates to people in the group.

Forums

The list above shows direct links to each of the group forums, but you can also use the forums to start general discussions if you’d like.

Going to the Forums page will also let you see the “tags” I’ve added to posts so you can see all of the action items at once, for instance.

In the forums, if you want to add a link you don’t need to know any special code – pasting a link and posting the update will automatically turn it into a link. If you do know basic HTML code, you can use it here. But you don’t have to.

You can link to another person by typing @ in front of their name – @Emily for me, for instance.

Private Messages and Notifications

If you’re logged into the website, you can send private messages to other people by going to their profile (or searching for them on the members page) and clicking on the “Send Private Message” button.

If you’re looking for a way to send messages to everyone in your group at once, let me know and I’ll set you up as a group admin.

If you want to control what sort of messages you get from this website, go to your profile, look for the Settings section at the end, then click on the “Notifications” link under that section to  decide what sorts of activity on the site will send you an e-mail.

You can also sign up for group updates by going to the Groups page or an individual group page clicking on the notifications section there.